EC2 Update – Previous Generation Instances

We have made some important changes to the EC2 pricing and instance type pages. We are introducing the concept of previous generations of EC2 instances.

Amazon EC2 has been around since the summer of 2006. We started with a single instance (the venerable and still-popular m1.small) and have added many over the years. We have broadened our selection by adding specialized instance families such as CPU-Optimized, Memory-Optimized, and Cluster and by adding a wide variety of sizes within each family.

As newer and more powerful processors have become available, we have added to the lineup in order to provide you with access to the best performance at a given price point. The newest instances are a better fit for new applications and we want to make this clear on our website. To this end, we have moved some of the instance families to a new Previous Generations page. Instances in these families are still available as On-Demand, Reserved Instances and Spot Instances. Here’s a list of some previous generations and their contemporary equivalents:

While we have no current plans to deprecate any of the instances listed above, we do recommend that you choose the latest generation of instances for new applications.

— Jeff;